African American slave narratives of the 19th century recorded the grim realities of the antebellum South; they also provide the foundation for this compelling and revealing work on African American history and experiences. Naturally, it is not possible to really know what being a slave during the antebellum period in America was like without living the experience. But students CAN get eye-opening insight into what it was like through the gripping stories of bravery, courage, persistence, and resiliency in this collection of annotated slave narratives from the period. Each of the collected narratives includes an introduction that provides readers with key historical context on the particular life examined. Moreover, each narrative is accompanied by annotations that broaden the reader's comprehension of that primary document. The primary source documents in this volume tell enthralling stories, such as how slave woman Ellen Craft utilized her particularly pale complexion to pose as a free white man overseeing his slaves to free herself and her husband, and how Henry Brown successfully shipped himself to freedom in a box measuring scarcely 3 feet by two feet by six inches deep—despite being more than six feet tall.

"African American slave narratives of the 19th century recorded the grim realities of the antebellum South; they also provide the foundation for this compelling and revealing work on African American history and experiences. • Presents information and primary source documents that support such key subject areas as American history, ethnic studies, and African American history, among other areas. • Introduces readers to unique slave narratives that often center on such topics as entrepreneurship, racial violence and resistance, gender, and subjects regarding the color line like pigmentation and passing. • Situates each slave narrative in historical context through the use of a document introduction and annotations. • Supplies slave narratives that are important primary sources and will help students with building interpretive, critical-thinking skills needed to be successful 21st-century learners."--Amazon

Six narrations by slave women about their lives during and after their years in bondage, honoring the nobility and strength of African-American women of that era.

The autobiographies of former slaves contributed powerfully to the abolitionist movement in the United States, fanning national--even international--indignation against the evils of slavery. The four texts gathered here are all from North Carolina slaves and are among the most memorable and influential slave narratives published in the nineteenth century. The writings of Moses Roper (1838), Lunsford Lane (1842), Moses Grandy (1843), and the Reverend Thomas H. Jones (1854) provide a moving testament to the struggles of enslaved people to affirm their human dignity and ultimately seize their liberty. Introductions to each narrative provide biographical and historical information as well as explanatory notes. Andrews's general introduction to the collection reveals that these narratives not only helped energize the abolitionist movement but also laid the groundwork for an African American literary tradition that inspired such novelists as Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson.

"Naturally, it is not possible to really know what being a slave during the antebellum period in America was like without living the experience. But students CAN get eye-opening insight into what it was like through the gripping stories of bravery, courage, persistence, and resiliency in this collection of annotated slave narratives from the period. Each of the collected narratives includes an introduction that provides readers with key historical context on the particular life examined. Moreover, each narrative is accompanied by annotations that broaden the reader's comprehension of that primary document. The primary source documents in this volume tell enthralling stories, such as how slave woman Ellen Craft utilized her particularly pale complexion to pose as a free white man overseeing his slaves to free herself and her husband, and how Henry Brown successfully shipped himself to freedom in a box measuring scarcely 3 feet by two feet by six inches deep--despite being more than six feet tall"--Provided by publisher.

The ten works collected in this volume demonstrate how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition by expressing their in anger, pain, sorrow, and courage. Included in the volume: Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw; Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; The Confessions of Nat Turner; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Narrative of William W. Brown; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb; Narrative of Sojouner Truth; Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of J. D.Green. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A century and a half after the abolition of slavery in the United States, survivors of contemporary forms of enslavement from around the world have revived a powerful tool of the abolitionist movement: first-person narratives of slavery and freedom. Just as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others used autobiographical testimonies in the fight to eradicate slavery, today’s new slave narrators play a crucial role in shaping an antislavery agenda. Their writings unveil the systemic underpinnings of global slavery while critiquing the precarity of their hard-fought freedom. At the same time, the demands of antislavery organizations, religious groups, and book publishers circumscribe the voices of the enslaved, coopting their narratives in support of alternative agendas. In this pathbreaking interdisciplinary study, Laura T. Murphy argues that the slave narrative has reemerged as a twenty-first-century genre that has gained new currency in the context of the memoir boom, post-9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment, and conservative family-values politics. She analyzes a diverse range of dozens of book-length accounts of modern slavery from Africa, Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, examining the narrative strategies that survivors of slavery employ to make their experiences legible and to promote a reinvigorated antislavery agenda. By putting these stories into conversation with one another, The New Slave Narrative reveals an emergent survivor-centered counterdiscourse of collaboration and systemic change that offers an urgent critique of the systems that maintain contemporary slavery, as well as of the human rights industry and the antislavery movement.